The Michael Hastings Wreck–Video Evidence Only Deepens the Mystery

Or was it?Michael Krikorian, an essayist and former Los Angeles Times crime
reporter, happened upon the scene a few hours after journalist Michael
Hastings’s speeding car slammed into a palm tree and burst into a
fireball.Krikorian has seen his share of fatal car wrecks. But this one was different. As he put it, “This demands a closer examination.”In accident-investigation parlance, it was a roadway departure–a non-intersection crash in which a vehicle leaves the traveled way for some reason.But how and why did Hastings’s Mercedes depart the traveled way, and why was it traveling so perilously fast?In a city where there seem to be as many car wrecks as cars, North Highland Avenue in L.A.’s Hancock Park neighborhood is not exactly Dead Man’s Curve. A fatal car accident there is rare.Highland is a four-lane neighborhood artery as straight as a
laser, with a narrow, grassy median lined with towering Washingtonia
robusta palms. In the two miles between Wilshire and Santa Monica
boulevards, not a single traffic fatality was recorded on Highland from
2001 to 2009, according to National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration data. http://map.itoworld.com/road-casualties-usa#fullscreen[1]In the final moments of Michael Hastings’s life, the car he was
operating accelerated to a treacherous speed before swerving off the
pavement, mounting the median and slamming into one of the palms. There
were no skid marks—no apparent attempt to brake before the collision.Hastings, 33, covered the Iraq War as a young correspondent for
Newsweek. But he made front-page news (and won the prestigious George
Polk journalism prize) for his 2010 Rolling Stone magazine profile of
“The Runaway General,” Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO’s security
force in Afghanistan. Hastings’s story portrayed the dismissive contempt
with which McChrystal and his staff viewed President Obama and Vice
President Biden. The general apologized, calling the profile “a mistake reflecting poor judgment.” But he was forced to resign.Michael Hastings was carving out a journalism niche as a muckraker, and some see nefarious forces at work in his death.We asked Michael Krikorian for his take on the curious accident,
which happened in his hometown on a block he visits several times a
week. He provides the details of new video evidence that offers a few
clues about the seemingly inexplicable fatality.—David J. KrajicekThis article was originally published by WhoWhatWhyBy Michael KrikorianShortly before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, June 18, I was walking with my
girlfriend, Nancy Silverton, to get my car, which I had left the night
before at her restaurant, Pizzeria Mozza, at Highland and Melrose
avenues. Walking west on Melrose, we noticed crime scene tape as we
arrived at Highland. Just to the south, a wrecked and charred car was
being pulled away from a palm tree in the median.We lifted the yellow tape and walked down the sidewalk to get access
to the alley leading to the lot where my car was parked. A Los Angeles
police officer stopped us. Nancy explained she owned the restaurant and I
identified myself as a reporter. The officer let us walk on and gave a
quick rundown: A man had driven into the tree at 4:30 that morning. He
was dead.My first thought was that another early morning L.A. drunk had killed
himself. I told the officer that a security camera located outside the
front door of the pizzeria probably captured the crash.As we talked to the police, a Mozza employee named Gary, who has been
staying at a small apartment above the restaurant, approached us to say
that he had heard the crash.“I heard a ‘whoosh,’ then what sounded like a bump and then an explosion,” he said. “I thought the building had been hit.”He said he rushed down and saw the car ablaze. Gary listened as two
men who claimed to have witnessed the crash told police the car had sped
through a red light at Melrose.Later, when the pizzeria manager arrived at work, we watched the
security camera footage. There’s no wonder it was a fatality. The crash
ended with a hellish explosion and fire. The officer, watching the
video with us, was as stunned as we were. He said, “I have never seen a
car explode like that.”Soon, a flatbed truck with the burned Mercedes CL 250 aboard drove
slowly by, going north in the southbound lanes of Highland. The front of
the car, particularly on the driver’s side, was badly damaged. I
snapped a couple of poor photos with my iPhone.The Man Who Brought Down General McChrystalNancy and I got in my car and went home. I went on to Watts to do
some reporting on another story and later to Gardena. That afternoon, I
got an email from a friend to whom I had mentioned the crash. It
included a link to an L.A. Times story about the wreck. My friend wrote,
“The driver was a well-known journalist: Michael Hastings. What a
drag. Obviously a talented guy. Wonder why he was driving so fast?”I went online and read about Michael Hastings, the guy who brought
down General McChrystal. The conspiracy theories were already being spun
on the web: that a bomb had been planted in the car, or that its
controls had been hacked and the crash was engineered remotely by an
unseen hand.For nearly five years, McChrystal served as chief of the Joint
Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s commando
units, including the Army Delta Force and the Navy Seals. This was not a
paper-pushing general. McChrystal was a soldier’s general who would go
on raids with his men. A reporter brings him down—and then dies in a
mysterious crash three years later. If this had happened in Russia,
wouldn’t we all figure it was some dark military conspiracy?I’m not a conspiracy guy, but my reporter’s instincts told me that this demands a closer examination. So I snooped around.Mysteries on the Video Tape“I’ve never seen an explosion like that,” said Terry Hopkins, 46, a
former U.S. Navy military policeman who served in Afghanistan, told me.
“I’ve seen military vehicles explode, but never quite like that. Look,
here’s a reporter who brought down a general. He’s sending out emails
saying he’s being watched. It’s four in the morning and his car
explodes? Come on, you have to be naïve not to at least consider it
wasn’t an accident.”I turned to the one piece of evidence I had: the security camera footage.The camera shows the view from near the entrance of Pizzeria Mozza.Four seconds into the start of the tape, a minivan or SUV goes by the
front of restaurant. Three seconds later, another vehicle goes by,
traveling from the restaurant front door to the crash site in about
seven seconds. At 35 seconds into the tape, a car is seen driving
northbound and appears to slow, probably for the light at Melrose.Then at 79 seconds, the camera catches a very brief flash of light in
the reflection of the glass of the pizzeria. Traveling at least twice
as fast as the other cars on the tape, Hastings’s Mercedes C250 coupe
suddenly whizzes by. (This is probably the “whoosh” that Gary, the Mozza
employee, heard.)The car swerves and then explodes in a brilliant flash as it hits a
palm tree in the median. Viewed at normal speed, it is a shocking
scene—reminiscent of fireballs from “Shock and Awe” images from Baghdad
in 2003.I have heard and read a wide range of guessed speeds, up to as much
as 130 mph. I think it’s safe to say the car was doing at least 80.Driving 80 on Highland is flying. Over 100 is absolute recklessness.Highland has a very slight rise and fall at its intersection with
Melrose. It’s difficult to tell by the film, but based on tire
marks—which were not brake skid marks, by the way—chalked by the traffic
investigators, it seems that the Mercedes may have been airborne
briefly as it crossed the intersection, then landed hard. Tire marks
were left about 10 feet east of the restaurant’s valet stand.(Later, I drove the intersection at just 45 mph, and my car rose up significantly.)About 100 feet after the car zooms by on the tape, it starts to
swerve. At about 195 feet from the camera, the car jumps the curb of the
center median, heading toward a palm tree 56 feet away.About halfway between the curb and the tree, the car hits a metal
protrusion—perhaps 30 inches tall and 2 feet wide—that gives access to
city water mains below. This is where the first small flash occurs. This
pipe may have damaged the undercarriage of the car, perhaps rupturing a
fuel line.I looked at the tape frame by frame. A second flash immediately
follows the first. It might be the brake lights, but it’s hard to tell.
The next frame is dark. Then comes the first explosion, followed
immediately by a large fireball.I showed the video to a number of people. Everyone had the same reaction: essentially, “Wow!”“This Was Not a Bomb”I showed the video to Scott E. Anderson, an Academy Award-winning
visual effects supervisor with Digital Sandbox who has engineered
explosions for many films.He viewed the footage more than 20 times at various speeds, including frame by frame. Anderson concluded, “This was not a bomb.”He said a bomb would have propelled the car upward, not forward.“It’s very hard to blow up stuff well,” Anderson said. “I think too
many things would have to go right. Luck would be involved. Good and
bad. Does someone doing this to Hastings want to rely on luck? Too many
things have to go right. It would have to be perfect. And that’s almost
impossible.”He continued, “It comes down to physics. A bomb would have lifted the
car and the engine up. Based on this video, the car doesn’t go up, and
the engine goes forward, which makes sense since the car apparently did
not hit the tree head on.”He said the fireball may be enhanced by the recording device.“That type of surveillance camera has auto exposure so it can change
what it sees based by the ambient exposure day or night,” Anderson
explained. “This camera is set at night and anything that happens very
quickly, be it a flash light or a big ball of fire, the camera won’t
react fast enough, so the first flash of light is going to appear much
bigger in the viewing. So the initial explosion would always look bigger
than it is.”He suggested a simple demonstration using a cellphone video app:
Strike a match in a dark room and it will flare up on camera much more
than in reality.Why Was He Driving So Fast?The pizzeria video is compelling, but it fails to answer the key question: Why was Michael Hastings traveling so fast?As Anderson put it, “None of this happens without the speed.”Some theorize that the car was hacked—operated remotely (like a drone, for example) by someone who wished to harm Hastings.That may be technologically possible, but is it plausible?Hastings ran at least two red lights, and possibly a third. Could a
hacker have planned for no cross traffic, which might have derailed the
mission? If the flash before the dark frame was indeed brakes, that
would indicate the brake light was functional. If the car were hurtling
along out of his control, wouldn’t Hastings have been plying the brake
pedal all along, not merely in the last second before the crash?And even if the brakes and accelerator were rigged, the steering must
have been functional, according to a Los Angeles Police Department
officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “For nearly a half a
mile, that car must have been going straight,” the officer said. “That
can’t be done at that speed for that long, even with the best
alignment.”“Stanley Got Him”The day after the crash, I found myself in the homicide squad room in
South Los Angeles. The Hastings topic came up, and one of the
detectives said, “Stanley got him. Took his time, but got him. That
wasn’t an accident.” (Meaning General Stanley McChrystal.)On cue, a sign showed up the next day on the now-singed Hasting’s
Palm: “This was not an accident.” By nightfall, someone had replaced it
with another message: “Go to sleep people. This was an accident.”Hastings’s death was national news briefly, but it was soon pushed
aside by subjects deemed more pressing to the mainstream media. The
George Zimmerman homicide trial was gearing up in Florida. Edward
Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, was playing Tom Hanks at a
Moscow Airport. Istanbul had erupted in the biggest anti-government
protests in its history, and political strife in Cairo was taking center
stage.Michael Hastings was put on the mainstream media’s back burner—or perhaps on an unlit hibachi behind the garage.But on YouTube the conspiracy thrived. One video that has received
over 8,500 views proclaimed that the plot was so over-the-top that the
culprits had removed the bombed car, and in the process, placed another
car in front of different trees. It also stated there was no damage to
the front of the car.I saw the car being towed away. It was absolutely mangled on the
front, particularly the driver’s side. I’ve lived in Los Angeles most of
my life and have seen the aftermath of many car crashes. This was one
of the worst. There was no way a driver could have survived.LAPD Traffic Bureau: ‘No Foul Play’Two days after the crash, the LAPD announced that there appeared to
be no “foul play” in the single-car fatal crash. That ignited even more
conspiracy talk: The “feds” had gotten to the LAPD and were hushing it
up.A week after that statement, the lead investigator on the case,
Detective Connie White from LAPD’s West Traffic Bureau, contradicted
that. When I asked her if “foul play” had indeed been ruled out, she
replied, “No. Nothing has been ruled out.”White said the investigation was nearly complete, but she refused to
give details. She said an official report, including toxicology results
on Hastings’s remains, may be weeks away.As far as a bomb or car-hacking, White said, “At this point there is nothing that leads us in that direction.”When asked if any explosive materials had been discovered on the car or at the crash scene, White sounded like she chuckled.She said, “Oh, boy. Hold on.”I thought maybe I had asked a touchy question, and I expected a “no
comment.” But she returned to the phone and said, “No.” The way she said
it, I wondered if she had shared a laugh with other detectives about my
question.She added, “If this were anything other than an accident, other
departments would have been brought in to investigate,” alluding to
homicide, the bomb squad or a terrorism unit. (Though one might think
“other departments” would have been needed in any case–simply to
determine whether it was an accident or not.)On TV, Hastings Provokes another GeneralI’ve seen a number of people use the word “fearless” to describe
Hastings. The word has different meanings to different people. To some,
it might be how well someone held up in the second battle of Fallujah.I have no idea how Hasting was in the trenches. But I watched him in
action on Piers Morgan’s CNN show last November against retired General
David Kimmit, an admirer of General David Petraeus. At one point,
Kimmit told Hastings that his impressions about Iraq after Petraeus were
wrong. Kimmit added that he knew this because he has been back to Iraq,
working in the private sector.Exasperated, Hasting threw up his hands, gave his unique smirk and
proclaimed, “I’ve spent more time in Iraq than you have, man.”Hastings went on to chide Kimmit for profiting off the war in the
private sector. “I’m glad the general was able to make money off his
services,” he said.In that TV vignette, I could see why a guy like Hastings would piss
off the military brass and would be so admired by fellow journalists.I hope that someone will be able to explain why Hastings’s Mercedes
was speeding like a silver bullet. Maybe the answer will show up in the
toxicology results. I know this much: American journalism has lost a
pit bull of an investigative reporter.